


Dissolution tide

by laughingpineapple



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Gen, Gender Roles, Purple Sea Of Collective Consciousness, Rules, Strange Places, Symbolism, Vast Distances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:41:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26176624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: American Girl™. And a woman holding up a lantern where the purple waves hit the concrete.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	Dissolution tide

**Author's Note:**

> Written (or rather, lined up headcanons in a row like so many unruly ducks) for bluerosering as part of countdowntotwinpeaks' WONDERFULXSTRANGE exchange! Trying to expand on the mystery without deflating it... 🤞 Happy anniversary!

**Boarding house regulations**

Lodgers shall, in turn:

1\. Tend to the domesticated fire. Nurture it. Heal it. It has been your place since time immemorial. Be receptive. Be gentle. Fear.

2\. Turn the output adjustment knob clockwise to adjust the voltage. Proper voltage for the unit is either 6 V or 324810 V. Observe and move the slider to adjust the length of the shadow drain. Adjust drain to near maximum length. Once adjusted, pass the electrode over the pin, and dream. Tune in to the world. You shall remember its pain in multiples of six. Do not dwell on the numbers on the device when you wake up. The room will not have changed.

3\. Draw horses on the walls and table. Draw thoroughbreds, abyssinians, bardigianos, paso finos, lusitanos and lipizzaners, draw herds and mares and struggling calves, standing, stabled, stampeding, saddled, snorting, shying, draw with ashes, chalk, a pencil, your hair, a finger against the veil left by your breath. Then forget. There are no horses. No pets are allowed in the building.

4\. Put your lips to the rose and whisper a mystery in the folds of its petals, make sure it is the real deal (find the threshold of understanding and keep it at your heels, that is the trick). Remember that a mystery also used to be a rite, carried out by the initiated.

5\. Accept the mist. When the purple coils come in, stay still. A light mist shall do away with causes and consequences, faze and confound. Let it grow thicker until you hear the crack of time. Stay still, then. Do not consign any actions to the fragmented time, lest they reverberate and pain they carry finds you again and again and again. Your mother’s will find you anyway. So will your grandmother’s, and hers. The mist makes it bearable. Be fazed and confounded. Segment. Accept.

5b. Naido will visit. Let her wash over you like you did the fog. There is a release in this communion. Feel safe in the warm hold of her flesh; the wounds will reach her and not you, huddled underneath layers of red where you will grow smaller, denser, until you harden like a stone. She is part of you. Close your eyes. Forget.

6\. Acknowledge that light belongs on the ceiling.

**Descent**

She is taking a drag sitting on the tall concrete balcony. There is nothing in the rules against that, as long as she does not fall off, and there is no risk of that. This place is made for symbols and giants, so when she sits, she sits cross-legged with room to spare, sparse like a cockroach on a wide wall.

When something twinkles in the corner of her eye, a distant echo of a light, far down across an immeasurable distance, her heart aches. A recognition of the self, perhaps, of another who is one and many, and through their shared multitudes their hands must have touched a thousand times. But the light also calls to her with a name she has long forgotten.

The bearer of that light has traveled to the foundations of the house on the sea and now stays still, waiting. She stares down for a year. The longing builds up. The light does not move.

She goes back inside. The device’s number is twenty-seven. The rules forbid its contemplation, but the world outside has changed and the room is the only guidance she can rely on. Today’s number is two and seven, then, which add up to nine, and she lets this fact resonate within her. Could be better. Could be worse. It sounds final, if nothing else. The kind of number you leave behind you as you close a door and take the first step toward an ending.

A back door sometimes exists, sometimes leads to the corridor; her stumbling hands find its indentation in the wall and pull the lock. She crosses it with great solemnity, balances herself on her feet and keeps walking.

Few doors open on the infinite corridor and fewer lights dot it. Its bends trace strange shapes in her mind. The memory of the light remains fixed at a certain angle she takes to call her North. As she crosses the darkened corridor, feeling the carpeting brush against her feet, she shakes with the thrill of a clarity of purpose, at long last, past the horses and the mist. The light-bearer reached out to her. She shall reach out in turn.

She drowns in concrete stairways. Downwards, always downwards.

At the bottom of the stairs, a forest of columns expands for a human lifetime. When perspective aligns them just so, a glimpse of the sky flashes on the distant horizon. Somewhere, a different flight of stairs leads further down. The columns’ capitals, carved with geometrical motifs, hold many dimensions and will not crack. Her shoulders still curve under the weight of the house above her. Her thoughts cannot reach the roof.

Smoke break. Shadows grow long on this remote terrace.

Further down. The walls hum with the voice of distant mechanisms, the roar of furnaces, the crackling of electricity, a lone record player laboriously coughing up a foreign symphony. But the house keeps its secrets and never shows her more than its smooth, unliving, naked surface. This place is not meant for people. It strips the humanity off you until you become rarefied enough that you can breathe its air. She was people, once – still carries slivers of memories with her, of the girl she was and of all the women whose pain she dreamt of and which hardened on her skin like a shell until she could barely move.

It has been months since she found the crude path that descends like a long, thin niche in the outside walls. After having crossed six million eight thousand five hundred eighty-nine concrete squares melded one next to the other to form the endless surface of the wall, she comes across a lump of jagged rock encrusted there like a jewel. The foundation is near.

**The sea in a shell**

In the end there is a single concrete path that dug itself into the rocks like a river bed. She crosses this canyon with the cliffs closing in above her head. What a pity, she thinks to herself, that she has no place in her heart for the beauty of these crags. It rains. She remembers standing tall in the rain and sticking her tongue out to catch the drops in a thousand five hundred fifty-seven lives in the desert; as she repeats that gesture here, she finds out that it tastes like salt. What felt like rain is the splashing of colossal waves that fill the sky with foam. The salt burns her tongue, somehow. As if she were snow to be melted. Nothing personal. Nothing is, in this place. She comes undone, step after step after step.

The light-bearer waits for her on the shore past the final bend. She clasps the rock under her hand and raises her head to look at her, after untold eons: in front of her, on the vast desolate shore, stands a woman in a black dress, carrying a lantern with her. Her fixed smile feels eternal.

“Laura Palmer,” she says in a belabored whisper. Words come foreign and backwards. “Do we still have angels waiting for us?”

Laura Palmer opens her arms in the same gesture they both remember from the angels so long ago: they will have to make do. Laura waits for her to fall into that embrace. Eventually, she does. The waves run miles across the water’s edge to lap at their figures. They takes the mist away from her, as it belongs to the water, then dissolve the hardships of a million lives until there is only Ronette at the center of them all, in Laura’s arms. She clings to her, clasping her brooch, the drenched sleeves of her dress. Laura keeps her close and caresses her hair until the purple sea takes all of Ronette and she is nonexistent and at peace.

Should a new woman rise from those waters one day, may she find a better life waiting for her.


End file.
